Mr Choueke’ s 10Km Marathon Swimming

Challenge

At Coleridge, we value children’s happiness and emotional wellbeing above all else. Our Well Being Team work hard to ensure our children and families can benefit from a robust and bespoke offer, this includes support from our counselling team and the number of different groups they offer, such as therapeutic yoga, support from our ELSAs (Emotional Literacy Support Assistants) and one to one work with our children and families.

The feedback from children, parents and carers, and teachers is fantastic. Children talk about how this work has helped them feel calmer, better understand their feelings, improved their sleep and helped make them feel less anxious. Teachers share how positive the impact of this work has been on the children in their class. Parents and carers speak about the impact our Well Being team’s work has on their children and subsequently their home lives.

As headteacher, I am so proud of this service, that we have built up over the many years I have been in post, and I see the impact of our Well Being offer on the whole school community on a daily basis. As we all know, if children are not emotionally secure and happy, it prevents them from reaching their true potential.

Sadly, it is becoming increasingly challenging to fund this work, as school budgets become more and more stretched. I have therefore decided to take matters into my own hands, to raise additional funds to protect this vital work we do from possible cuts.

On 11th November, I will be swimming a marathon 10km in the Olympic Pool in Stratford, in order to raise money to help pay for the different well-being projects we run. In particular, a new initiative we would like to introduce, called ‘Sports for Thought.’ This is a sports oriented, therapeutic group for boys and girls, which helps them to navigate issues that arise when playing competitive games such as losing, cooperation, team work - issues that are also often replicated in their school and home life.

You can donate using the following link. Thank you in advance for your support.